Tablets to outship PCs for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2013 – IDC

Tablets had been somewhat of a conundrum before Apple came up with the iPad. Only then, it made sense for people to approve and acknowledge a different kind of a computer that swiftly replaced the netbooks of our era. But was it ever enough to replace or outsell the traditional PC and Laptops? Well, according to IDC, the company that constantly releases numbers on the Smartphone market, the last quarter of this year will mark the first time ever that the tablets will outship Traditional PCs, including Desktops as well as Laptops. The above chart shows just that.

As you can see from above, the total no. of shipments currently stand at 315.3 for Traditional PCs and 227.3 million for tablets for the full year of 2013, but IDC expects that Tablets will outship total number of PCs combined in a specific time frame, which is the Q4 of 2013. They haven’t released the numbers for the expected numbers in the quarter yet, but we feel that it is highly possible with the down turn in traditional PC shipments. However, the overall shipments in an year is expected to be higher for Tablets than PCs in 2015, according to IDC, with them predicting 2017 projected marketshare for each of the device categories in the above chart.

Some say this is the Post PC era where PCs are dead, and some say PCs are just in the process of evolution according to our needs, and it is still called a PC. Are Tablets PCs? Is this the post PC era or just another PC era we don’t need to name? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.